Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 302 posts

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#91

Post by austhrow743 »

ArtWomb wrote: post #53
agent008t wrote: post #16

Diving seems like one of the recreational activities where it is easy to end up doing something much riskier than you intended (another I'd say is alpine hiking): 1. Being able to easily sign up for a dive at an all-inclusive resort makes it seem more 'fine', you get a false sense of security that you will be taken care of. 2. Dive shops tend to be fairly relaxed with checking if someone is properly qualified to go o…

Am certain if you ask 100 beginner divers, 99 will have their own brush with death adventures! Mine came in the form of a six foot barracuda getting a bit too close for comfort. I am sure if I hadn't played it cool. Had somehow attacked or acted aggressively to shush it away (when I was a guest in it's deep sea domain). It would have enjoyed a nice lunch of fresh human flesh. The second was going below the hard deck…

If the Great Barrier Reef is on your bucket list then you really want to get on that asap. It's getting more and more bleached.

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#92

Post by smnscu »

achow wrote: post #2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuMN206Jzo Interview with Tarek Omar (the diver rescuer in the article) and location shot. Much better than reading the article.

Also this -- professional diver discussing the video recorded by someone who dove there unprepared and died https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv4aK2O1X_M

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#93

Post by kubanczyk »

diveanon wrote: post #84
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60

We have something like that, off the coast of Long Island. It’s the wreck of the San Diego ; a WWI battleship that sank at the close of the war. It’s upside-down, with a hole in the hull, and rests in about 40 meters of water (120 feet or so). What makes it dangerous, is that it’s filled with silt, and it only takes an errant kick of the flipper to fill a room with zero-visibility mud. People panic, and panic at 120…

Entering a wreck at 40m without a guide line is asking to die. I have over 10k dives and the closest I came to death was when I was guiding on the liberty wreck in bali when a small earthquake shook the wreck, I was barely 3 meter into the wreck that I had dived hundreds of times and couldn't find my way out. Fortunately my buddy was outside the wreck at the time and used his banger to guide me out. Point is, shit ha…

> 10k

Gulp... That puts it in perspective. It's exceptional to dive a hundred times on a wreck in Bali and write about it on HN - and do both in the same live. Respect!

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#94

Post by jiggawatts »

climb_stealth wrote: post #68
jiggawatts wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience at a tourist destination island in Australia. We went on a dive with just a couple of meters of visibility, with a big group holding on to a anchor chain. I couldn't see the dive instructor and I couldn't equalise my ears. Everyone kept going and I basically just stopped at about 10 meters down. It just wasn't worth it, especially given the ear pain I had for weeks afterwards. As a counterp…

Would you care to share where the good and bad experiences in AU were?

Bad was Great Keppel Island. Basically it was a bunch of drunk 20-something-year-olds doing "activities" like diving, getting plastered with overpriced drinks, and unsuccessfully hitting on each other. The coral was half dead from bleaching, and the other half was torn up by boat anchors.

Good was Lord Howe Island, which is the last true paradise on Earth. It's on the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef, so it has coral, but none has bleached. The waters are pristine and protected. It's a place more civilised than Japan. You can leave a camera bag with $10K of gear in it on the beach and go on a hike, because it will be there when you get back. There's a beach with a shack next to it where you can stuff a $20 bill into a jar to rent snorkelling equipment. The jar had about $500 in it. Nobody is going to take that either. This place is what most places should be like, but aren't.

The dive at Lord Howe Island was just... unspeakably beautiful. To set the scene: the missus had done a dive before (supposedly), and this was an introductory dive anyway to a depth no greater than about 12m, but she had a panic attack. While the instructor was patiently helping her relax, I snorkelled around the boat. Above were thousands of wheeling seabirds coming in to roost to a cliff about 100m high. That view alone was spectacular. Below were layers of coral and shoals of fish like underwater highways of colour. Had I paid the fee just to see this I would have considered it money well spent.

Then the younger instructor leading the team of kids doing their PADI certification offered to take me on a one-on-one dive since a boy in his group used his air too quick and we had spare time now. I got to see shellfish bigger than I had ever seen, a huge octopus squirt ink in the instructor's face, then we dove through a tunnel under coral, there were fish bigger than me, and generally it was just awesome.

I highly, highly recommend this place to everyone who's willing to listen and has the budget. My tip is: skimp on the accommodation, splurge on the restaurants. Go there to turn your phone off and relax.

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#95

Post by Nursie »

agent008t wrote: post #16

Diving seems like one of the recreational activities where it is easy to end up doing something much riskier than you intended (another I'd say is alpine hiking): 1. Being able to easily sign up for a dive at an all-inclusive resort makes it seem more 'fine', you get a false sense of security that you will be taken care of. 2. Dive shops tend to be fairly relaxed with checking if someone is properly qualified to go o…

> Dive shops tend to be fairly relaxed with checking if someone is properly qualified to go on a particular dive. They barely check your papers or equipment, if at all.

I find this is very destination dependent.

I did some Cenotes dives in Mexico that I was seriously underqualified for, and some deeper wreck dives in the Carribean too.

OTOH in Australia everything was very much by the book. The new book, even (when I qualified for PADI Open Water in the early 90s we did deep-diving as part of the training, and were qualified up to 30m, but sometime in the 00s AFAICT things changed and O/W people are these days confined to 18m or less.)

Which reminds me, I must get my 'advanced' at some point soon. I did a deep-dive specialty a while back so that I could do some more interesting reef dives at the great barrier reef, and an enriched air qualification as well, but not the advanced O/W.

One day, after many years, I may even have the qualifications to do those dives I did many years ago... Thankfully I was young and stupid enough to just go with it and enjoy it at the time.

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#96

Post by ChrisBland »

I'm an avid diver; got certified as soon as I turned 12 years old and have had some great adventures and life lessons diving and continuing my training and education. After many many conversations and encounters on dive boats with others (some seasoned, most tourist / rec divers) - I believe that 90% of the industry sees diving akin to a roller coaster ride instead of Skydiving. The risks with scuba are there for you to see and the situation can get deadly very quickly, but most people don't see the inherit risk or shrug it off. I've watched countless divers who are renting their bc/reg/tank/computer not even go through the most basic safety checks prior to diving. They simply trust the operator and jump in. This is not a "batteries included" sport. It is that lack of preparedness that leads to fatal accidents, people who don't respect the sport for what it is and the dangers that come with it. If you don't plan your dives, understand the dive profile, then you are going to panic of make a stupid decision when you shouldn't. When I was younger, technical dives; cave and deep, where my two favorite things to do, the amount of planning it took to pull off the dives was enjoyable and I enjoyed pushing myself in to those situations and the focus it required. Now that I have kids, I won't do those dives anymore b/c I understand that when you plan them, there is a greater than 0 chance that you don't come back and its not worth it to me to take that chance.

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#97

Post by maratc »

meowfly wrote: post #87
kubanczyk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not: > You need to be PADI Advanced Open Water Diver who is at least 18 years old to enroll in the Cavern Diver course. https://www.padi.com/courses/cavern-diver

Edit: I was wrong with the above statement. After doing some research around this. Cenotes are an exception to the rule and even though Open Water Divers often do enter inner rooms in wreck dives and caverns what matters is maintaining a direct line of ascent. ---- Original ---- Open Water can do caverns. Dos Ojos is incredibly popular and has hard ceiling. Edit: Also Cavern Diver is just a specialty cert and doesn't…

Did you read your own link?

> certified Open Water Divers can take a cavern tour guided by professionals qualified by some of the cave diver training organizations to lead such tours. This is a highly controlled, limited tour along a line into the cavern zone, which is defined as within the natural light zone and within 130 to 200 ft (39-60m) (some minor variations here) of the surface.

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#98

Post by [deleted] »

nieve wrote: post #41
baybal2 wrote: post #25

The website has an interesting line of code: > return console.log("Messaging without detection successfully executed.")

For predictable irony points that's coming from a component provided by SourcePoint who claim to be a "privacy compliance platform for digital marketing, with the tools to protect consumer privacy, manage compliance, and optimize revenue."

[deleted]

Re: The Blue Hole in the Red Sea is the deadliest dive site in the world

#99

Post by meowfly »

maratc wrote: post #97
meowfly wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I was wrong with the above statement. After doing some research around this. Cenotes are an exception to the rule and even though Open Water Divers often do enter inner rooms in wreck dives and caverns what matters is maintaining a direct line of ascent. ---- Original ---- Open Water can do caverns. Dos Ojos is incredibly popular and has hard ceiling. Edit: Also Cavern Diver is just a specialty cert and doesn't…

Did you read your own link? > certified Open Water Divers can take a cavern tour guided by professionals qualified by some of the cave diver training organizations to lead such tours . This is a highly controlled, limited tour along a line into the cavern zone, which is defined as within the natural light zone and within 130 to 200 ft (39-60m) (some minor variations here) of the surface.

Yes, I read my own link. OP was talking about a guided tour.
Post reply on HN